On Saturday the United States and Israel launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran. An unknowable number of the country’s leaders and its civilians have been killed including hundreds of schoolchildren in a single strike.
All of those deaths constitute murders committed by Donald Trump and those who answer to him because this attack was and continues to be a war crime. It’s a textbook war of aggression against a sovereign state with no legal basis either domestically or internationally. And yes, the laws of warfare apply even if you don’t like the sovereign state being attacked.
The lack of justification for this is obvious if one possesses even a basic understanding of world events and the recent history between the United States and Iran. But even if one knew nothing about geopolitics, one could merely listen to the shifting, desperate justifications Trump and his accomplices have offered in the past 48 hours to see the lack of a case for war:
- “Iran interfered in US elections” – there is no evidence for this whatsoever and even if it were true it is not a casus belli which justifies an indiscriminate bombing campaign and the execution of a country’s people and its leaders;
- “Iran has nuclear weapons” – There’s is no credible evidence that the Iranian government was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. Hell, Trump himself claimed mere months ago that we had already destroyed Iran’s nuclear capacity in a previous attack;
- “Iran was on the verge of attacking the United States”: Despite Trump’s ridiculous claim to this effect in his State of the Union address, the Iranian military does not have the capability of striking the U.S. and is nowhere close to developing that capability. As recently as last week Iran was engaged in diplomatic discussions with the United States;
- “Iran was going to attack U.S. allies and bases in the Middle East”: Again, there is no evidence that Iran’s leaders had any intention of preemptively attacking U.S. forces in the Middle East or U.S. allies in the region. Such attacks are happening now and likely will happen, however, in retaliation for our unjustified attack.
But even if this was not a case of Trump and Israel launching a war of choice for no reason whatsoever other than bloodlust – even if the belligerents had made a surface-level attempt to lay the groundwork in ways world leaders typically do before attacking other countries – this is nonetheless a vile and senseless act which flies in the face of morality and history.
We have been through this so, so many times. We know exactly what’s going to happen. We know what happens when presidents plunge the country into open-ended warfare under false pretenses, particularly in the Middle East.
We know that people will die. We know that lives will be destroyed. We know that it won’t end with the firing of missiles but, rather, that it will create reactions and blowback and unintended consequences that last for generations. American aggression causes death, misery, and instability and foments retaliation that brings more of the same. We have watched this happen for decades. And now we have yet another president pretending that never happened and claiming that, this time, it’ll all be good.
Well, it’s already not good. We’ve already killed children and hundreds if not thousands more innocent people based on Trump’s lies, his ego, his belligerence, and his stupidity. We’ve placed thousands more innocent people in the line of fire who would not have otherwise been at risk. The world is more dangerous today than it was when we went to bed on Friday night solely because of Donald Trump’s malevolence and arrogance and the malevolence and arrogance of every single person who fills his increasingly addled mind with misinformation and every single person who follows his orders.
Nobody wants this. Nobody, I should say, apart from the bloodthirsty psychopaths in charge of this Regime and the psychopathic corporations, grifters, and gamblers who profit from it. Those who are not complicit in this war, however, know that it’s an act of insanity that will only lead to chaos, instability, and more death.
We should be furious at this being done in our name. We should be furious that our institutions, our leaders, and our nation’s elites have utterly failed us and that, as a result, we live in an imperial dictatorship that has led us to this dreadful and deadly place.
We should not rest until those responsible for leading us here are imprisoned or hounded out of public life forever. Both of which are far, far more merciful outcomes than they deserve.
(Photo: Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran. Photo Credit: Abbas Zakeri, MEHR News Agency)